Hey everybody, I don't want to waste too many words here, so I'll just get to it: My friend Jake and I are starting a non-profit. I've known this guy for eight years now. In 2000, he was a carpenter in New Jersey. I was a lifeguard in San Diego. We both joined the Peace Corps and were sent to Lithuania. He looked at me funny cause the girl he was dating was my language teacher. I looked back with my patented pokerface. A week later we were cracking jokes and talking about women. Eight years later, he's one of my best friends and for eight years we've both been on a mission to do something meaningful with our lives and talents.
Since then we have accumulated a whole lot of experience: mastery of two difficult languages and years and years living and working in foreign towns and villages. There have been fistfights, forced vodka shots, heartbreaks, lost loves, lost hair, huge debts, illness and fever, frustration, sadness, confusion, we've been manipulated and lied to, been loved and supported, there's been euphoric success and dismal failures. (It's a challenging lifestyle!) Jake did a total of five years in the Peace Corps. With the help of his family in the States he built a grammar school deep in Malawi's countryside for a village that had no other community structures. They MADE the bricks. They cut a tree down to MAKE the doors. That's called getting things done. It is one of the few times in my life I watched someone do something, and knew I couldn't do it myself. That's how tough it was. And that's why we make a good team. He can do things I can't and vice versa Thanks to you and your overwhelming response to my humble little DVD we raised a thousand bucks that went toward that project. I really couldn't be prouder or more encouraged.
So what are we going to do now? We're gong to get organized and we're going to get formalized. First, we're going to roll our two blogs into one and focus our voices. In the coming months, my name will come off this site and we'll start the process to establish a non-profit platform to operate from. Our first project, which Jake outlines in the post below, will get started in the next couple weeks. It's an experiment in development fundraising. We're going to see if the amazing music created in the village of Zolokere, by church choirs and traditional healers, can be sold using the Radiohead model. That is, placing the tracks on line for anyone to download in return for a contribution of any size. Funds generated will be put back into the community as development investments. It's a loop, it's creative and it's development.
So what does that mean for you? We want to take all the obstacles out of the way for you, our friends, to get involved. Development work, advocacy and good deeds do not need guilt or morality to work. Art and creative projects are not sacred and development work is an ethical minefield that is by no means morally superior to anyone else's work. We are humble and lucky. We want to give you stories, music, video and images from interesting places. We want to empower your dollar bills. And we want to share with you what we've had the enormous privilege to see and do. But most of all, we want to get things done. We want to drop all the baggage that comes with development work and advocacy. All the talk and the righteousness. All the inefficiency and ineffectiveness. We want to cut the bull and make things happen.
All that said, we won't get anywhere without YOU. Please stay tuned, and please don't hesitate to get involved.
Jake's first post is below, he'll be in the village in less than a week. Lucky dog.